On Creating a Syllabus for The Renaissance

I'm constructing a syllabus for a course on The Renaissance, which is a fascinatingly difficult project--if you're going to do more than just crib your predecessors. What precisely is the Renaissance? Where are its boundaries, chronological and geographical? Do you include, say, the Reformation? -- where I teach, they have a separate course on the Reformation, so it will only appear in minor key for me. Do you focus on the change of mind and expression that follows upon Renaissance humanism, or do you talk about everyday life, politics, society, culture, in Europe from 1350 to 1600? -- and if you don't talk about the latter, will your students ever learn it, since they may never take an overlapping course again. How do you compensate for the lack of knowledge about the classical texts and past that is basic to Renaissance humanism? And this question of focus bears on both the definition of history (itself strongly conditioned by Renaissance conceptions of the discipline) and of the Renaissance; to teach the Renaissance thematizes intensely the general debate about what aspects of history ought to be emphasized. All this, by the by, compounded by a lack (so far as I can tell) of good textbooks -- what I've looked at so far, anyway, fails to satisfy.

Me, I'm in many ways more interested in the Northern Renaissance (where Spain counts as Northern!) after 1500, so I need to make an effort to do proper justice to the Italian Renaissance. I will definitely have some stuff on Renaissance education -- Grafton and Jardine's Humanism to Humanities makes one more positive about modern students, when you realize just how limited actual Renaissance education was. (Fluent knowledge of Latin, comprehensive knowledge of where every allusion came from and what it meant, but limited exposure to the actual texts; everyone knows you're referencing the 2nd Satire of Juvenal, many fewer have actually read the 2nd Satire.) I want something about everyday life. I'm debating whether to include anything on the Military Revolution. I'd love to combine The Prince and The Conquest of New Spain, but probably don't have time. I'd thought to include Jonson's Sejanus, but, frankly, seeing Twelfth Night reminds me that intense classicism is insufficient compensation for lack of genius. Ah, delightful quandaries.

Twelfth Night

I just saw a lovely performance of Twelfth Night at the Pearl Repertory Company. Mixed the humor and the sadness perfectly, fine ensemble performance. When I am rich, I will be a major donor to the Pearl.

The Unfriendly Party

1) Part of my opposition to the Democrats - to the rationalizing Enlightenment, philosophical liberalism, etc. - is that they are unfriendly. This is slightly different from (although allied to) anti-Americanism. Rather, it is the opposition to the entire concept of friend and enemy, and the substitution in its place for atomized individuals united by passionless reason, the laws of passionless reason, and the technocratic managers who solve amoral problems for their atomized clients. A nation needs friendliness to survive; the Unfriendly Party withers the nation. But I also don't care for Unfriendly Parties abroad, even where the alternative is a more full-blooded enmity to me and mine. It's all very ticklish, but an enemy can become a friend; an atomized client, of whatever nation, will never be a friend to me or to anyone.

2) An enemy can become a friend. Ponder at home, class.

3) Democracy's factions are always an incipient civil war, an incipient fracture of amicitia. We cannot avoid the danger, although we can work to minimize it.

4) Moral self-critique always threatens to fracture amicitia. Indeed, it demands a fracture of the old amicitia, and a rebuilding of a new one; it accepts the separation of a saintly minority in amicitia with God (reason, etc.) as a preferable option to the endurance of the old amicitia. Prophets and puritans always threaten friendship. The particular strength of the Puritan tradition in America presents a constant danger to amicitia - but the corresponding benefit of an improved nation.

5) But not all critique is loving critique. And, independent of the degeneration of moral self-critique of America into anti-Americanism, the degeneration of moral self-critique into rationalizing self-critique removes that element of love. "I will love my categorical imperative, and hug him and squeeze him and call him George." Mm, not so much.

Who are the Ideologues?

A column by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post publicizes the fact that the Obama administration has reversed its decision to retain the services of Mark Dybul. Dybul is the physician who was so successful in managing the outgoing administration's program of AIDS relief in Africa (the great unsung humanitarian accomplishment of the Bush years).

Why, exactly? It would be nice to have an answer. It would be nice if that answer isn't because some of our political allies believe fighting AIDS should never involve encouraging sexual restraint, no matter how many lives are at stake. But this article in the Washington Blade -- apparently one of the only news outlets to cover the story when it broke -- suggests that the answer is precisely that:

Two sources familiar with the U.S. Global AIDS Office said Obama’s senior advisors were concerned about the negative reaction from some AIDS activists and reproductive rights groups to news that Dybul was keeping his job.

...

As the Blade reported last week, a number of AIDS and reproductive rights groups have urged Obama to replace Dybul with someone the groups see as more likely to change the Bush administration’s insistence that at least some international AIDS relief funds be linked to abstinence-only programs.

On Anti-Americanism

1) Carl Schmitt's distinction between friend and enemy -- which echoes the earlier concept of amicitia as the essential bond in politics -- is crucial here. The polity presupposes friendliness, and, as a corollary, a common concept of the enemy. Lack of civil discourse to your fellow citizens is a sign that you are no friend -- as is a presumption of their evil nature and ill-will. Inability to perceive and to label an enemy as an enemy also indicates that you are no friend. And note that friendliness is the basic, not the fact of citizenship. Citizens are supposed to act as friends to one another -- but if they act as enemies, this fact can and must be noted.

2) Actions do matter more than intentions in the judgment of status as friend or enemy. The distinction here is (reiterating a repeated theme in this blog) between personality and character. Personality is a claim toward inward sincerity and authenticity; character the outward deeds. The claim by the enemies of America to be pro-American is one of personality and sincerity -- "I love America in my heart, no matter what I do." The truth of such claims is unverifiable and irrelevant; what matters is the action, the surface, the appearance. Now, the judgment of character is not objective, by scientific reason, by history; it is by other human beings, judging character, and staking and establishing their own character by these judgments. Friendly action, mutually recognized, constitutes friendship -- the recognition itself an action.

3) Anti-Americanism, like Anti-Semitism, extends to people who don't recognize themselves as bigots. There are self-hating Americans, just as there are self-hating Jews. Indeed, the categories can overlap.

4) One can look at words and silences, patterns of hostility, inability to confront the vocal anti-Americans, presumptions of the worst about America, unwillingness to act in America's interests abroad, but it comes down (as it should) to passions. Far, far too much of the left hates Bush, Republicans, conservatives -- me -- with an intensity far outweighing any odium they evince toward the actual enemies of America, the joyful killers of Americans. If they are pro-American, they are pro an America that doesn't include me; they have declared themselves my enemies. So let us say that it is only an argument to call these men of the left anti-American; it is an argument rooted in the uncivil, unfriendly hatred directed at me and mine.

5) "It's all in your mind," said the wolf to the pig. "Come on out from that brick house of yours and let's be friends. My heart is pure." Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. I know you by your teeth stained with my brothers' blood.

A Small Illustration

It's always fun when we get a perfect test case of the media bias against Republicans:

It looks like President Obama hasn't gotten acquainted to his White House surroundings. On the way back to the Oval Office Tuesday, the President approached a paned window, instead of the actual door -- located a few feet to his right.

Doors didn't open automatically for Obama’s predecessor either. While making a hasty exit from a 2005 press conference in Beijing, former President George W. Bush tugged on the handles of a door, only to find it locked.

Bush laughed off the blunder, but the pictures still live on as part of Bush's lame duck legacy. However, there was little note taken of Obama's rookie mistake.

Note that I'm NOT saying that Obama's apparent confusion of a window with a door should be widely covered. It didn't even deserve this little notice in the Daily News (except as evidence of media bias). But Bush's attempt to open that locked door in China was replayed endlessly on news shows for what seemed like days on end. (The excessive coverage was mocked at the end of this very funny 2007 JibJab video).

When Democrats make human mistakes, they're human. When Republicans make human mistakes, they're idiots.

One True Scotsman

Abstractart, in comments, revives his One True Scotsman critique - essentially, that conservatives take unrepresentative voices as characteristic of the left, thus wrongly allowing them to characterize the left as anti-American. Alpheus dissents. Leaving aside the substance of the debate for the moment -- I am, of course, on Alpheus' side, although he is far more restrained than I am -- it strikes me that this goes to the heart of historical technique. (What follows steals somewhat from Gadamer.) History, after all, is essentially about judgments of significance, whether any particular example is representative of a whole, whether particular examples can be woven into a meaningful pattern. Our thoughts and actions in modern politics -- in all realms of life, really - are aspects of this historical judgment; every man his own historian, as he constructs a meaningful history and a meaningful present. The historical technique - political judgment -are inescapably intertwined with the process of choosing One True Scotsman. And all our judgments inevitably differ, as our horizons, our experiences, our judgments differ. Gadamer offers the hope of a fusion of horizons -- that we will, ultimately, be able to come to a common judgment as to the nature of Scotsman, a common sense of history, that recognizes the irreducible diversity and plurality of our selves, outlooks, judgments, but allows a reasoned juncture. This not the same as the Outlook of Reason - the objective view, the impartial spectator, the eye of God.

Abstractart, in his comments, I think is a little impatient of the human condition, which is essentially one of One True Scotsmanism, not to be overcome until the eschaton immanentizes.

Another part of the debate turns on how much validity to assign to the self-understanding of the American liberal-left -- as Abstractart puts it, is it useful to call them "objectively" anti-American rather than to analyze them in terms of their subjective desires? I sympathize with Abstractart's resistance to the "objectively" style of analysis; the Marxist word does recollect the wrongheadedness of Marxist historical analysis. On the other hand, history can't entirely restrict itself to the self-understandings of its subjects: the view from without is necessary too. If the favored policy goals of liberal-left Americans overlap sufficiently with those of America's avowed enemies, some phrase such as "anti-American" gains explanatory plausibility. But this isn't my main point; rather, to say that both the views from within and without are necessary.

Lost Horizon

Rod Blagojevich says:

"But if you're asking me do I see myself like a modern-day Frank Capra movie, and I'm the Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper character, a guy idealistically trying to do what's right for people, fighting a system, and then be pushed back? Yeah, I see myself that way."

It just kills me -- tears me up inside! -- that I'm too busy to compose a timely parody. (Oh the possibilities! Mr. Blagojevich Goes to Jail! Meet John Law! It's a Wonderful Fucking Life!)

Why now, Blago? Why must life be so unfair?

On Public Opinion

The endless talk of pundits, talk-show hosts, bloggers, etc., is clearly part of the constant attritional war of politics, the constant struggle to shape public opinion on the margins and so shift the incentives for policy makers. (All that nattering does serve a purpose, boys and girls.) I include in this analysis not only the discussion of the policies themselves, but the endless attacks on character and horse-race discussions: on the margins, people are more likely to vote for appetizing people, and to support winners; whistling DIxie, saying your doomed candidate has a chance of victory, is a necessary, if not sufficient, political tool. The modern flood of words about politics, alas, is meaningful, and (as Arthur Miller almost said) attention must be paid to it.

What's fascinating about the next year or so is that this talk is virtually the only tool Republicans have left. Their filibustering minority in the Senate will only be used when they think they have public opinion on their side; hence the war of words will be essential. Furthermore, they will have to conduct this fight absent control of the mainstream media. It makes for a fascinating case: a major party, with a real chance to gain power in the future, which nonetheless has virtually no levers of political machinery in its hand, and must operate almost purely through public opinion to gain any political victories at all. I think this is worth keeping in mind as one reads/listens to Republican words in the next few years.

On Inflation

Apparently the US is printing money with gay profligacy, and we are doomed for a bout of high inflation. I wonder: is this supposed to be a feature rather than a bug? That is, given that we are a nation of debtors, much of whose debt is owned by foreigners, doesn't printing money and inducing inflation shift the burden of pain (at least in the short run) from Americans to Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Arabs, etc.? Could this thought have been spoken by Paulson, Bernanke, etc. in their closed-door meetings? Given a grim situation, might inflating our debts away actually be the best solution? NO!, I am sure the Economists in the crowd will say. Let me rephrase that: might it be the most politically appetizing solution, regardless of its intrinsic merits?

On Teaching

Teaching forces you to remember the broad sweep of history, and not just focus on one narrow corner. Teaching makes you read primary sources and secondary sources, not just what you've assigned, but more to boot, to stay ahead of the students and to answer their questions. Teaching gets you to make connections, to see what themes connect different moments in history. Teaching forces you to make judgments of importance, as you decide what to mention and what perforce to ignore. Teaching gets you to practice the fine art of rereading. Teaching (at least to begin with) makes you write as much as your students, in notes and outlines. Teaching hones the arts of lecture, conversation, and (yes, really) listening. It is, I realize more and more, a constant goad to self-improvement.

And one can be lazy about it, and too often I am, but what task is that not profession is that not true of? It's another one of the arts of character.

Shameful Op-Ed Excess

Here's the kind of garbage journalism we can look forward to in the Obama era. Of course, it's really just a more shameful version of the low, dishonest journalism we've seen on the Left for a while now.

The author of the column, Leonard Pitts, often attempts to cast himself as a moderate. And, in the interest of fairness, he's a pretty good op-ed writer when he's at his best. But this is the kind of column that makes me think he's a scumbag. Because the whole column is based on a lie.

Pitts repeatedly quotes Rush Limbaugh as saying of Obama, "I hope he fails." No context is provided. And the context makes it perfectly clear what Limbaugh meant, as did Limbaugh's reiteration of his statement in an interview a few days later:

I would hope he would succeed if he acts like Reagan. But if he's going to do FDR -- if he's going to do The New New Deal all over, which we will call here The Raw Deal -- why would I want him to succeed? Look, he's my president. The fact that he is historic is irrelevant to me now. It matters not at all. If he is going to implement a far-left agenda... Look, I think it's already decided: a $2 trillion in stimulus? The growth of government? I think the intent here is to create as many dependent Americans as possible looking to government for their hope and salvation. If he gets nationalized health care, I mean, it's over, Sean. We're never going to roll that back. That's the end of America as we have known it, because that's then going to set the stage for everything being government owned, operated, or provided. Why would I want that to succeed? I don't believe in that. I know that's not how this country is going to be great in the future; it's not what made this country great. So I shamelessly say, "No! I want him to fail." If his agenda is a far-left collectivism -- some people say socialism -- as a conservative heartfelt, deeply, why would I want socialism to succeed?

Seems reasonable to me. I mean, "dissent is patriotic," right? It's not like Limbaugh is saying he hopes Obama loses a war or gets shot (i.e., the sorts of things that routinely get said on the Left about Republican presidents). All Limbaugh is saying is that, to the extent that he believes Obama's policies are bad for America, he hopes Obama is unable to achieve them.

I'm right there with Limbaugh on nationalized health care, by the way. It will, I am certain, be a disaster. And it will ultimately represent a tremendous loss of liberty for the American people. So I certainly hope Obama's aspirations to put the state in total control of our medical care (and, incidentally, to give the state complete access to all of our medical data) do not come to fruition -- though I fear that they probably will.

But reason and common decency apparently aren't going to stop Leonard Pitts when he's worked himself into a lather. Compared to Pitts's almost content-free bloviations, Limbaugh sounds like a major thinker and a model of enlightened sanity. Pitts accuses the Right of anger, but who sounds angrier -- Limbaugh or Pitts? Even I, writing this admittedly angry post, don't feel or sound as angry as Pitts sounds. (Incidentally, I'm also pretty sure I did more research for this post than Pitts did for his column. Rereading Pitts's column, I also wonder if this post didn't take me longer to write.)

And what is the Left's renewed obsession with Limbaugh, anyway? Why is he suddenly back as their special hate-target on the right? I suppose the answer has to be that Bush has stepped out of the spotlight. It's much easier to demonize the Right if you have a human face on which to draw the horns.

Rosenbaum on Joel

This has got to be one of the most inadequate pieces of artistic criticism I've ever seen. Ron Rosenbaum sets out to explain "the awfulness of Billy Joel" and then focuses his attack entirely on the lyrics -- not a word about the, you know, music, which I thought was the reason most of us listen to songs.

I'm not saying that lyrics are unimportant, but isn't it a well known fact that most pop lyrics, shorn of the tune, kind of suck? Even the librettos of operas and the words of hymns often don't read very well when the notes are taken away. So what? They're secondary. We just want to hear a human voice, and it doesn't really matter if the words are much good or not as long as they don't distract us from the tune. Is Rosenbaum saying Joel's lyrics are so bad that the tune doesn't even matter?

Personally, I'm ambivalent about Billy Joel. I hate some of his songs. I'd be quite happy never to hear the overly bouncy ones like "Uptown Girl" or "We Didn't Start the Fire" ever again. But for a lot of his stuff, I have a sneaking fondness -- "Roberta," "Zanzibar," "All About Soul," "Somewhere Along the Line," "This is the Time," "I Don't Want to Be Alone," and "Sleeping with the Television On" just to name a few. I even enjoy some of the overplayed ones, like "Piano Man" (though my gut instinct would probably be to scan past it on the radio).

I read Rosenbaum's piece because I keep thinking someone will come along and talk me out of my bad taste. I'm really prepared to be convinced that this isn't good music. Since so many people look down on Billy Joel's music, it would be a relief to me if I could convince myself that I shouldn't like him, either. But Rosenbaum doesn't help me do that. I always assumed that when people sneered at Billy Joel it was because they thought his melodies were insipid or meretricious or lame (which is what I think in the case of some of his songs). It never occurred to me that people might despise Joel for his lyrics instead.

"Several" vs. "A Few"

Arethusa and I have a long-standing disagreement about whether "several" and "a few" mean different things. If I say, "there are several reasons why Ryan Seacrest cannot be allowed to survive," is that different from "there are a few reasons why Ryan Seacrest cannot be allowed to survive"? I claim that "several," in common usage, usually indicates a greater number than "a few." Arethusa, backed by the evidence of most dictionaries, says they mean essentially the same thing: a number greater than two but not very many.

This question has, of course, been discussed on the internet, where most people seem to agree with me but make me nervous by going a good deal further than I would in specifying exact quantities (e.g. "a few is 3. several is 4-5.") or by seeming to be heavily influenced by the fact that "a few" sounds like "two" and "several" sounds like "seven."

I'm having a little trouble deciding to what extent I think the quantities evoked by both "a few" and "several" are relative to the specific items that one is talking about. If I say, "I have a few/several copies of the agenda," am I talking about the same sorts of numbers as I am if I say "I was sick a few/several times last year"?

New Semester

I've started a new semester. More than usually busy just now. Good start; lots of students asking questions, making comments.

Things Change

When I was a kid, and even into my twenties, people would sometimes hear a phrase and say "that would be a good name for a band."

This never happens to me anymore. Now it's always "that would be a good name for a blog."

And with this post, I have turned into Andy Rooney. Please shoot me.

Oh, Please God, Yes....

Embattled governor Rod Blagojevich is thinking about a major media blitz to take his fight nationwide. First stop: The View. (I hope he's already flipping through his Norton Anthology, picking out the verses he wants to quote in various media outlets.)

Christmas seems to be coming very, very early this year.

Perceiving Intelligence

Last night I watched a movie (Vacancy with Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) where the characters seemed to be a good deal dumber than I am. They took too long to figure things out (why did you need a second piece of evidence when the first one could be interpreted in only one way?) and missed opportunities they should have seized unhesitatingly (there's a gun right in the next room, for God's sake -- you made a big deal about noticing it earlier!). They were, I think, considerably less smart and resourceful than average people would be in their admittedly very stressful situation. Fortunately, for them, the bad guys were also none too clever.* It was a bit like watching the mummy pursue Abbot and Costello.

For some reason, it bugs the heck out of me when characters in fiction aren't very bright. (I'm talking here about ostensibly normal people, not people whose lack of brains is their character, like the man-children like in Steinbeck or Faulkner.) In fact, I like characters to be smarter than me, the way detectives in crime novels and film noir usually are. One thing I liked about Veronica Mars (TV noir) during its brief run was that the people in the show were usually a step or several ahead of me in figuring things out.

I'm not sure this preference is any different from most people's predilection for fictional characters who are prettier, more robust, richer or better connected than themselves. It seems to me that it's also usually realistic for the characters to be more on the ball than the audience, since they're actually supposed to be facing the situation portrayed (which presumably concentrates the mind). Besides, they also have more time to think about the problems confronting them than the audience does (since time in fiction tends to be telescoped).

But it occurred to me, as I was watching this movie, that a significantly less intelligent viewer than I (I'm assuming such a person exists) wouldn't be bothered: he or she wouldn't see the problem. And then it occurred to me -- I had lots of time to think about other things while Beckinsale and Wilson groped their way toward the obvious -- that to some viewers very far down on the Stanford-Binet scale the characters in this movie must have seemed like geniuses, basically indistinguishable from Philip Marlowe or Veronica Mars. And this reminded me of one of the great tragedies of human life, the difficulties we all have in evaluating one another's intelligence.

Other human attributes -- beauty, strength and so on -- are pretty easy for anyone to judge. Even if something like beauty or charm is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, most of us can usually judge fairly easily how most others will react to a given person's qualities. This is true, anyway, for social contexts with which we're familiar.

But brains are tricky. In the absence of objective tests (I mean real-life problems as well as IQ tests) we can only fully appreciate someone else's intelligence if we ourselves are somewhere within striking distance of that person's thought processes -- i.e., if we're not too much dumber than they. Even with objective tests, if we don't understand how someone was successful we may be inclined to see their success as mere luck, or the result of factors other than intelligence.

Thucydides talks somewhere about how most people won't credit stories of great accomplishment unless they believe that they themselves could have accomplished the same things in the same situation. What I think he means (here I go, probably misinterpreting a guy who was a lot smarter than me) is that people need to be able to understand how something was achieved to appreciate the nature of the achievement. If a strong guy lifts a heavy weight, we intuitively understand the feat even if we couldn't have lifted the same weight ourselves. But if someone invents something, or solves a thorny intellectual problem, or is successful in his or her career, we may simply not be able to grasp, without great effort, the nature of the insights involved in these accomplishments.

I know from my own life that it's often taken me years to see why certain writers and thinkers have such a reputation for brilliance. Plato, for example, seems to have gained substantially in intelligence as I've developed intellectually. Like the father in Mark Twain's quip, he seems to have gotten a lot smarter than he was when I was younger. The same is true for certain popular thinkers like Thomas Sowell and -- I hesitate to say it, but it's true and it's a particularly striking example -- Rush Limbaugh. I always agreed with what these guys had to say, but it's taken me years to understand why other people think they're so sharp.

The inability to judge other people's intelligence has real consequences. We can be deceived by quacks and empty suits. We can think that people who "sound smart" or look smart are saying something important or profound when in fact they're just saying things that are irrelevant or nonsensical. Or we can dismiss as trite or self-evident the words of people who are saying something really important or profound.

I have no idea what to do about this. I'd like to come up with some heuristics, some internal rules or maxims with which to get a handle on this problem. Obviously, no rule would work in all cases, but it would still be nice to have some good general principles to apply. And I don't think I have any such principles. A rule like intelligence will usually be distinguished by clarity is appealing, except I'm pretty sure it's not true. In fact, if someone is a lot smarter than you are, they'll often only seem clear if they're making a special effort to communicate with you personally. An advanced physics textbook would seem pretty obscure to me, but that doesn't mean its contents don't reflect great intelligence. Stupid is as stupid does seems like a good rule, but its usefulness is vitiated by the fact that luck plays a large role in life and not everyone is striving toward the same ends. If lots of people think someone is brilliant, he's worth a second look is a decent rule, I guess, and maybe the one I've personally found most valuable, but I admit it sounds rather feeble.**

So maybe in this case, as in so many others, alas, the best we can do is simply to be aware that the problem exists? And for those who aren't aware of the problem, may I recommend Vacancy (2007)? I believe it was nominated for a Teen Choice Award....

[*e.g., they never seemed to realize that, in a pinch, a huge plate glass window constitutes a possible point of entry to a ground-floor motel room. Nor did they seem to grasp that, if someone covers the lens of a surveillance camera, that ought to intensify the interest of the people on the other end of the circuit in his now invisible activities.]

[**Trite and self-evident, in fact?]

Four, I Say, Three Freedoms! (Would You Believe Two?)

A post by Mark Steyn in The Corner at NRO last night discusses the steady erosion of free speech that's been occurring lately throughout the West. (He specifically mentions Holland and Canada, but the trend is, alas, more widespread.) As Steyn notes, the United States is virtually unique in having a specific protection for freedom of speech written into its Constitution*, and the tradition of free speech absolutism in America has so far prevented here the kind of political persecution that now routinely takes place just across our northern border.

This raised in my mind the depressing question: how long before the American Left begins working systematically to undermine the free speech clause? Recent talk of resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine represents the beginning of a legislative effort to muzzle the press. With the weakening of the old, liberal-dominated media and the growing size and influence of potential victim groups who want to be shielded from offensive speech, more fundamental measures -- i.e., a reinterpretation of the Constitution to gut the First Amendment -- may soon seem desirable.

There's an excellent chance Obama will get a Supreme Court nomination or two, and Democrats' obstruction of Bush's federal court appointees was so sustained and so successful that he'll be able to fill a lot of seats on the various circuit courts with left-leaning judges -- folks sympathetic to "progressive" goals who are also believers in the "living constitution." Add to this the growing popularity among left-leaning legal thinkers of using foreign jurisprudence as a guide to our own, and it seems almost inevitable that at some point the attempt will actually be made to circumscribe freedom of speech and the press as it's traditionally been understood in the U.S.

Depressing, as I say, but that's what I'm here for.

[*More accurately, lots of countries' constitutions nod in direction of free speech, and what's really unique about the U.S. Constitution is that its protection of free speech is unqualified. In European countries, constitutional "protection" for free speech is almost always accompanied by some formulation that essentially eviscerates that protection. Thus, for example, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen -- a quasi-constitutional document in the Fifth Republic -- declares that "any citizen may speak, write, print freely" -- except where laws are made which say otherwise!]

Outrage of the Day

This is pretty astounding, even if the guy is lying about his motives:

A Romanian immigrant brutally raped a young woman on a railway station so he could be sent to prison for a bed, food and English lessons at the same jail as his brother.

"When I was on the railway station I thought I should rape this lady in order to get a place to eat and sleep and learn the English language," he told a psychologist.

Yet more evidence for the feminist position that rape isn't about sex, I suppose. Also, British railway stations apparently don't have those ESL instruction ads that are all over American subways.

But there's nothing else we can learn from this. About criminal justice or immigration policy or anything else.

Inaugural Address Reactions (UPDATED)

A few observations on Obama's speech, which I liked less than I had expected and which, when I did like it, I liked for different reasons than I had expected.

(1) Let me begin with what's going to seem like a piece of extreme persnickityness. "Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath." No, there have been forty-three. Obama's is the forty-fourth presidency, because Grover Cleveland had two of them. It would be nice to get these things right. (UPDATE: Arethusa noticed this first.)

(2) I thought the speech was, on the whole, too heavy on metaphor and imagery. Obama is usually a good writer, but this felt overwritten. And the metaphors were often clunky ("we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war") and didn't always sit easily with one another. If peace is "still waters" and prosperity is "rising tides," then...do we have to choose between them? Is one better than the other?

(3) Throughout the speech, I was troubled by the awareness that Obama seemed to be trying and failing to paper over deep philosophical divides. The text was filled with praise for rugged individualism, personal sacrifice and responsibility, humble and obscure effort. But that praise was uneasily joined to a call for collective (and collectivist) action. Were "the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom" really guided in their efforts mainly by a feeling that America was "bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions, greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction"? This is a hard, tricky question. Is the genius of America the solidarity of its people or the extent to which it allows proper scope to their individual ambitions? Would one of Obama's risk-takers and doers fight to preserve the option to choose his own doctor, or would he gladly accept the personal sacrifice that nationalized health care might imply? How would he feel about electronic medical records or limits on his carbon emissions?

I sensed an even greater dissonance in the alternation between appeals to return to the best traditions of America's past and assertions that we now belong to a "new age" and need to discard old "dogmas" and ways of thinking -- to "put away childish things." He tried to bridge this difficulty in a couple of places by speaking of "our better history" and by distinguishing between "new challenges" and old ideals with which to meet them, but it was hard not to detect a deep ambivalence about the relationship of America's past to its present.

A conservative was tempted to wonder if Obama wasn't just using words in an attempt to press traditional American ideals into the service of a deeply nontraditional vision. I know this is what statesmen do, reinterpreting the past to meet the needs of the present while preserving a sense of continuity. (Lincoln and Roosevelt are the two great examples of this in American history.) All I can say is that to me, in this speech, the continuity felt really forced.

(4) Alongside the forced continuity I perceived a lot of smaller stolen bases. "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified." Wait, I'm still asking the question about whether government is too big! What does "works" mean? Is it just the three things Obama named, or is there more? (I'm afraid there's lots more.)

(5) Finally, there were a few lines that just grated on me like hell. "On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord." And if McCain were taking the oath? The point where I thought my head might actually explode was "restore science to its rightful place." Because I know Obama doesn't mean by it what I'd like him to mean. It's not anti-science to believe that embryonic stem-cell research is morally problematic. It is anti-science, IMHO, to buy uncritically into the global warming and obesity epidemic fervors that are nothing but stalking horses for Very Big Government.

(6) The speech had many passages which I absolutely loved. This (along with the concluding paragraphs which are too long to quote) was my favorite:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Very neocon, actually! I admit, I was slightly annoyed by "ready to lead once more." What the hell else has George Bush been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Africa with respect to AIDS? But on the whole, I thought Obama was very, very good in the parts of the speech where he addressed the rest of the world. He was properly pro-American, and spoke rather frankly about Islamic radicalism and terrorism.

Listening to the speech, I began to wonder if my misgivings about Obama during the election campaign weren't exactly backward. I had mainly been afraid that he would squander Bush's gains in the realm of foreign policy. Now, with the economic crisis opening the door to an unprecedented expansion of government, I'm much more worried about Obama's domestic policies, and I have faint hopes that disaster might not overtake us abroad.

SECOND UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg and I think almost exactly alike, right down to our preferred examples.

Cheney Pulls Muscle, To Attend Inauguration In Wheelchair

The conversation in the White House:

"George, can I hold a long-haired white Persian pussy-cat in my lap?"

"No."

"Speak in a German accent and cackle?"

"No!"

"Wear short pants and panty hose?"

"What the hell, Dick -- do what you like. But if you try to give me a smooch, you're getting a wallop to the chin."

"Oo, goody! Thank you, George."

Yes, He Can

Victor Davis Hanson asks why Barack Obama, while ostensibly trying to lower expectations for his presidency in the face of the Herculean challenges facing America, nonetheless continues to cultivate the image of a Messiah, a second Lincoln, a golden boy.

Hanson is thinking like a hard-headed realist, and he's assuming that other people are inclined to be hard-headed realists. But if there's one thing that the meteoric ascent of Obama proves, it's that hard-headed realists are fairly thin on the ground in America these days. Obama is a fantasy president, and he knows or intuits that most Americans will weigh the fantasy heavily in their judgments of his presidency. By encouraging Americans see him as a great, almost magical figure, Obama can, perversely, help ensure that they will forgive his inevitable missteps and failures. The stronger and more beautiful the illusion, the harder it will be for America to become disillusioned.

One of life's under-discussed truths (and one Alpheus has been brooding on lately) is that different people's accomplishments are judged according to very different standards. We cut some people a lot more slack than others, depending on how much confidence they inspire in us -- and a huge component of our confidence in other people is how much we want to believe in them. And a big part of encouraging other people to believe in you is, of course, projecting belief in yourself. This is the basis of sound advice like "dress for the job you want, not the job you have." (It's also, incidentally, the basis of the seduction theories that Phoebe finds so objectionable.) In employment, in love, in friendship, in virtually every aspect of life which is concerned with relations between human beings, a show of self-confidence is crucial. Hence Obama's fake presidential seal, the campaign commercials that ended with "Obama. President." -- and so on. All this hardly needs explaining.

Obama's personal mythmaking is aided by several factors: he's handsome, he's got a lovely voice, he's got the enthusiastic support of the media, he's black. More than anything else, though, Obama is aided by a culture in which image is becoming more and more important. This is especially true in politics, since Americans' grasp of the issues is becoming weaker and weaker.* They are less and less able to judge whether a policy was well or ill advised. When the time comes to evaluate an apparent mistake of Obama's, the extent to which people have bought into the Obama myth will probably be decisive.

So it makes perfect sense for Obama to continue to puff up his personal image while simultaneously stressing -- even overstressing -- the magnitude of the challenges he now faces. The presumption is that people will be prepared to say, for example: Even an Obama is having trouble breathing life back into America's moribund economy! But if anyone can do it, Obama can!

And, of course, there's another much more sinister way in which Obama's grandiose image and his emphasis on the difficulties we face will work in tandem: they both imply that he should be allowed to take great steps that America wouldn't otherwise countenance: nationalize health care, redefine foreign policy, restructure entitlements, etc., etc. And even if these steps don't work out as promised, astute image management will enable Obama to seem successful by virtue of having accomplished them in the first place. In fact, if a promise is compelling enough, it can even excuse the very failure of that promise to be realized.

[*The reasons for this are many. The world has become more complex and the activities of the federal government have become more extensive. Meanwhile, Americans read less and talk less about politics. The great culprit, I think, is education -- every cohort of students is less and less well trained to think objectively, and the decline of history education means they're particularly badly equipped to think objectively about the kind of issues that arise in politics.]

Fact Counterfact

Various alternate histories lately bubbling up to make polemical points about modern-day Israel. I am most taken by Noah Millman's Angevin Counterfactual, which adds to polemic a certain imaginative and detailed love for his made-up world that makes it exciting on a purely literary level; I'd love to read a novel set in his world. But all these counterfactuals, it seems to me, are insufficient. I say, why not imagine a world where everybody who ever lived in Israel is still around and decides to come home? Here I present a list of the Polydiaspora, and their Evil Foreign Supporters, all of whom have been competing for the land of Israel since 1948:

1) The Canaanites have been in exile in Carthage since the fall of Jericho. The Tunisian and Spanish governments have sponsored their right to return. The Canaanites fellow-pagans, the evil Wiccans, provide financial support for their settlement.

2) The Philistines have been in exile with their fellow Greeks since the fall of Gaza. Greece has sponsored their right to return, as has the evil Greek diaspora.

3) The Twelve Tribes of Israel, resident in Guatemala for 2,500 years, have decided to return under their leader Rachelberta Meirchu; they are supported by the evil A.I.M. and the evil Mormons.

4) Listeners to Coast To Coast are firmly convinced that aliens experimented with some of the Twelve Tribes to create sasquatches. Should the Ben Sasquatchi emerge from the woods to make contact with us, the evil CTC community also supports their right to return to the land of their furless ancestors.

5) The Samaritans were not nearly wiped out in the 500s by rebellion and plague, but went into exile in China, where they formed a notable mercantile community and introduced the matzoh as a staple of Chinese cuisine. They are now returning with Chinese support, and the help of the evil Chinese diaspora.

6) Sabbatai Zvi went into English exile, where he converted George Fox to Messianic Judaism. The Society of Friends of Sabbatai, more commonly known as Quakers, are now returned to the West Bank settlement of New Swarthmore, with the support of the evil pacifist diaspora.

7) Baruch Spinoza's defense of the Netherlands against invading French troops in 1672, done by a peculiar series of devices involving mirrors, triangles, Transcendental Pyrotrigonometry, created a tradition of Dutch Pythagoro-Zionism. A select band of Spinozists, with the support of the evil Dutch diaspora, have settled somewhere in Israel, in a location that can only be determined by a rigorous process of meditation, deduction, and optical experiment.

8) The triumph of the Frankfurt Assembly in 1848 led to a concerted policy by the liberal Second Reich to promote settlement in Zion by liberal German Jews. This policy is supported abroad by the evil German diaspora; in America, the editors of Erläuterung, Stephen Walt and Walter Mearsheimer, are the most prominent supporters of German Zionism.

9) After Sigmund Freud saved the life of Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889 by an intensive psychotherapy session, Rudolf asked him what he wanted as a reward. Freud asked for a full professorship at the University of Vienna medical school; Rudolf, now an adept at psychotherapy, realized that this was a displaced Zionist project, and instead devoted the resources of the Austro-Hungarian empire to the establishment of Hassid colonies in Israel while the Messiah tarries. Freud, in disappointment and disgust, attempted to shoot Rudolf in 1914 as he was visiting Sarajevo, but missed due to tremors in his hands, as he had given up cigars the year before so as to concentrate on marksmanship. Kept in the Arkhamisch Asylum for the criminally insane in Moravia for the remainder of his life, Freud devoted himself to developing the theories of the collective unconscious and orgone. All this has been chronicled by the eminent historian, the Bilgoraj Rabbi, I. B. Singer. The evil Austro-Hungarian diaspora supports the Hassidic settlement.

10) After the conversion of the Pahlavi monarchs to the Bahai religion, Persia became a supporter of the resettlement of the Babylonian Jews of Persia and Mesopotamia in Israel. Modern-day Iran, and the evil Iranian diaspora, are the main supporters of this movement.

11) Marshal Alfred Dreyfus, the Savior of Verdun and Chief of the French General Staff, threw his prestige behind a Sephardic Zionist project during the 1920s; the Jews of Sefared, throughout the Arab world, would return to Zion under French auspices. This Zionist project is supported by the evil French diaspora.

12) A journalist named Theoder Herzl had an idea that there should be a home in Zion for all Jews, but the only people who supported him were fucking Jews and fucking Americans and fucking evangelical Protestants. Everyone in the world is happy when Muslims decide to slaughter a few more Herzlites, and they write editorials in the world press saying how the kikes had it coming to them.

Conference; Miscellaneous Notes

* Cigar-Chewing Conservative: 'Washington just bought New York, and New York hasn't realized it yet."

* It occurred to me from the conversation at the conference that a number of conservatives really want to believe that Obama will justify Bush by continuing his policies. Now, perhaps he will, but it strikes me that there blatant desire is also a fact Obama can manipulate. I can see him throwing a few crumbs towards conservatives -- perhaps lip service, and nothing more -- and seeing them gush about him, regardless of what he does. Conservative commentators seem to think Obama might do this to liberals; they should consider the possibility that he will do it to them instead.

* The Mayoral Biographer: Israelis felt shame for abandoning the south to Hamas rockets. Also, he emphasized how both Hamas and Fatah are Islamist rather than Palestinian-national, key to why they are impossible to negotiate with. He said that in 2006 Israelis refused to talk about Islamic enemies -- our enemies are Palestinian, Arab, etc. -- but now they speak openly of Islam. He relayed a conversation from an Israeli who talked by cell-phone with a former employee from Gaza (tangled lives over there); said employee was hiding in the basement not only from Israeli rockets but also from Hamas squads rounding up human shields/victims for their rocket launchers.

* Various at the conference referred to the technocratic--bureacratic--managerial classes lambasted so often here at A & J by the happy Marxist term "the New Class" -- a reasonable description, thinks I. The Red Tory Theologian linked the rise of the New Class - in Britain, he took it to be quintessentially Blairite - to the fall of the virtue-classes, possessed of local knowledge, and also linked that fall to the rise of mass immigration and multi-culturalism, which broke the social cohesion and cultural consensus that allowed the virtue classes to exist. An interesting point thinks I, and it also explains why the technocrats are in favor of mass immigration and multi-culturalism: they induce the cultural beakdown that makes the technocrats appear as necessary mediators among the hostile cultures. Which implies in turn 1) the technocrats will favor mass immigration, multiculturalism, and all policies that promote social atomization, ad infinitum, to perpetuate their own role; and 2) more optimistically, should the New Class ever fully seize power and achieve cultural hegemony, they might then revert to virtue-leadership. I'm less optimistic about the second, but one should keep that possibility in mind.

* It occurred to me as a libertarianish fellow was excoriating the bank-bailout as a massive fraud upon the taxpayer by the bureaucratic-financial elites, that the situation now is vaguely analagous to 1789, when the Federal government assumed the debts of the several states -- punishing the virtuous states that had paid off their debts, rewarding the spendthrift states that hadn't -- and attached the interests of the American people to that of the Federal government, by means of the debt. So now the interests of the American people are being attached to their businesses by means of the debt. This could be simply robbery of the taxpayer, as per our libertarian, or it could be a road to some reattachment of the people and the corporate elites. Might be worth figuring out how to get to that road.

* Another person talking about how America's actions will be constrained in the future by its debts. It occurred to me that there are two mutually exclusive situations. 1) China (above all) holds on to our debt, and our actions (and the Chinese) are limited by our mutual dependence; and 2) China unloads our debt, the value of the dollar falls and it ceases to be a reserve currency, and our actions are limited by the global market as are those of every other country. Both of which are unpleasant, but the logic would indicate that we can't be affected by both at once. (Cigar-Chewing Conservative: "This is all based on a CIA report. They always predict America is in decline, and they're always wrong. Never trust the CIA about anything; they're incompetents.")

* By the by, it would be interesting to consider how much America's foreign policy in the Middle East acts in China's interests

* Same person: liberal democracy only really functions in a nation state; America's evangelizing of liberal democracy implies evangelizing the nation state. Thinks I: another reason why uncontrolled immigration and mulitculturalism are a disaster, since they're disassembling our nation state, and hence our liberal democracy.

* The chair of the venue: "'Yes We Can' is about to become 'Now You Must'." And: "All this talk about Smart Power is about smart people telling dumb people how to live."

* The Red Tory Theologian really had an extraordinary stream of thoughts. He wants to revisit corporatism, as well as the concept of politics as paideia; he says English Tories are beginning to look again at Bellocq, Chesterton, distributism, and they're all for it; there's an encyclical by the Pope coming forth on the subject, or something similar, which everyone is waiting to read; tradition, virtue, Greece, Israel or all necessesary; civil unions are OK, but gay marriage just ain't; he wants the Conservative Party to return from Thatcher to Disraeli, economic egalitarianism and social conservatism; the Thatcherite right and the Blairite left are really all liberals, and Blairites are bureaucrats with a slavish respect for the market; "All things begin in Britain ... and occasionally America; (that to general laughter); you need a good elite; you need a good Empire; Bellocq had predicted an alliance of monopoly capital and monopoly bureaucracy; against Thatcher for dismantling industry and local government; Thatcher and Blair were awful for the white working class, which has lost all sense of responsibility for jobs and family; the liberal-communitarian debate is beginning to get into political debate; traditional education survives more in America than Britain. As I've said earlier, a live mind.

* Schmitt talks about the arbitrary exercise of power lying behind all normative systems. I think: Gandalf striking Grima Wormtongue with his staff is a Schmittian moment.

* An idle thought: America, Britain, and France all possess very strong executives. We're also the three most effective remaining democracies. An argument for a strong executive?

* The presentations at the conference ran short, allowing more time for discussion! A miracle of the Lord.

That's about it on the conference, I think.

Cast of Mind, Molding Young Minds

I used the phrase "cast of mind" in an essay question last November; in the essay itself, one of the students talked about "molding young minds." It struck me suddenly how we preserve both these phrases, with the connotations of cast = hard-set, and mold = pliable, from a very specific metallurgical process, which is by now, if not extinct, virtually unknown. As always, it's interesting how the words carry on when the referent is gone. I wonder how far back these phrases go? Alpheus, Arethusa, are there Greek and Latin equivalents? Lazy, curious minds want to know.

On A Conference

I was just at a one-day conference that I rather enjoyed, which was thought provoking, and was full of pleasant people. Also small enough that I have to be more than usually cautious to preserve my pseudonymity. So let us say: it is an academic venue that is unusually open to conservatives, such that, although I didn't much state any political opinions myself, I felt unusually unconstrained and happy while attending. Not that all attendees were conservative by any means -- although the Marxists could be, for example, Anglican theologians espousing a sort of Red Toryism, all for redistribution of the wealth and against gay marriage. And libertarians familiar with critical theory. Frankly, this doesn't necessarily make for productive political dialogue: people with different politics largely spoke past each other. Nevertheless, to be able to speak past one another freely is a real plus. The introductory keynote, by the by, emphasized that many academics started thinking that being critical and being left wing were identical; that when they had to make the choice, most decided to be left wing; that this venue preferred instead to continue being critical. A pleasing way to put it.

Two moderately famous people in attendance, neither of whom I had realized beforehand had a connection with this particular venue. One is a noted conservative famous for hawkishness vis-a-vis Iran; he chewed a cigar in the afternoon; made comments both conservative-political and academic-historical; and was amusingly caustic about the unreliability and incompetence of the CIA. Another historian, noted for his admiring biography of a recent famous mayor, chatted about his recent trip to Israel, reporting on opinion on the Gaza War there. (Overwhelming favorable, even among the limousine liberals.) A great many of the presentations consisted of academics venturing from their specialties onto contemporary politics. With the greatest respect in the world, I am not convinced their political views were any more profound or informative than what you can get from any pundit or blogger on the web. This applies both to the conservatives and to the liberals. While I felt rather shy talking about academic matters, the experience strengthened my skepticism that any credential makes for superior political argument. Of the various speakers, the most intellectually exciting -- and probably the best speaker - was the Red Tory theologian, arguing for a sort of religio-cultural traditionalism combined with economic distributism, and radical skepticism of both business and governmental elites. I don't agree with all his ideas by a long shot -- and distressingly anti-American in his foreign policy views -- but an engaging, live mind. Another speech was given by a small-business-owner who is also a long-time reader of critical theory -- happily ferocious against both our corporate and our governmental elites. I took extensive notes during the Congress, and came up with some thoughts that I'll post in the next few days.

I socialized more with the younger people. Theoretically one ought to insinuate oneself into the conversations of the graybeard, as you wriggle yourself to their attention, but I always find it difficult to interrupt old friends chatting with one another. So, young professors, grad students, etc. were my interlocutors instead. Perfectly nice chat. One person I was hoping to impress I'm afraid I bored with banalities about the weather (cold!); ah, well, can't be brilliant all the time.

More anon.

Bah, Humbug II

No second-round interview. Bleagh.

Worse Than Vista

I always feel silly posting a link to an item that's appeared on a vastly more popular web site, like Hot Air. But...in this case I can't help myself. The new web ad for Microsoft Songsmith is one of the most painful things I've ever seen/heard. It's so very, very bad. It's not even so-bad-it's-funny. It's so-bad-it-will-tease-out your-inner-masochist-and-make-you-hate-it-while-it-gives-you-pain-and-you-hate-yourself-for-watching-it-but-can't-stop. In fact, this ad only makes sense if (1) they assumed people can no longer tell between good and very, very bad music or between good and very, very bad acting or (2) it's hip/ironic, and the badness is just a ploy to get people like me to spread the ad around so that no potential customer will be left unaware of the product's existence.

I'm guessing it's number (2), since the ad is actually *about* a guy trying to come up with a pitch for a product no one should want. Still, I'm not sure that justifies the pact Microsoft has apparently made with Satan. Is it any coincidence that one of the first songs on the web that's been ruined by running is through Songsmith is Van Halen's "Running with the Devil"?

On What I Don't Know About British History

1. Geography. More precisely, I don't know where all the counties are in England, much less Ireland or Scotland. I can tell you Cornwall and Yorkshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, and Sussex, to speak nothing of Middlesex, but it starts getting hazy very rapidly after that. I'm a little better on the major cities of England -- but then, there is only one. I have a vague ability to distinguish a Home County from a Dark Corner of the Realm, but it's imperfect. Obviously, this is a problem -- not an insurmountable one, I trust, but a problem. Not to moan too much: it's not as if the Brits know where all 50 states are, and I suspect not every Brit knows where every county is either. (Especially now that they've been erased from the political map.) Still ....

2. Family Relations. I once said in a class that every Englishman of note was a second cousin of every other Englishman of note. The professor was not amused, but it's still almost true. You need to know the cousinages to figure out what's going on. For an obvious example: it wasn't until college, I think, that I realized that Winston Churchill was the first cousin of the Duke of Marlborough. Not an insignificant fact, that.

3. The Public Schools, Oxford, and Cambridge. I'm firmly convinced they exist, but the inner dynamics elude me -- and the inner dynamics are extraordinarily important for political and religious history, just to begin with. I'm fuzzy on which college is in which university, which college has what tradition, who attended where, what precisely you write for a double first, and so on. It's the esoteric history of England. In essence, I can't tell Gryffindor from Slytherin, and you miss some of the story thataway.

I suspect a lot of American professors of British history have similar troubles, thought I could be just hopeful here. I mention all this in hopes that I am typical.

"Smiles, everyone! Smiles!"

Ricardo Montalban is dead, and it seems most people -- at least on the internet -- remember him as Khan from the second Star Trek movie. For me, though, he'll always be Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island.

That show, along with The Love Boat, which aired immediately before it on ABC, was one of my first encounters with prime-time TV. I was very young. I was introduced to both shows by my babysitter; she wanted to watch them and seemed annoyed (ya think?) by my failure to comprehend the premise of the shows. Not being familiar with the narrative canons of television, or with life in general, I had a lot of stupid questions. My questions about The Love Boat were, I think, dumber than my questions about Fantasy Island:

So, they just sail around on this boat if they want to fall in love?

So, they're just living on the boat? It's not taking them anywhere to stay?

What's a yeoman purser?

You can imagine how annoying this was. Along with my age, I suppose I would ask that some allowance be made for region and social class. Where I grew up, nobody ever went on cruises, at least in the 1970s. When I told a classmate at school that I had seen The Love Boat, he excitedly told me that there was a real Love Boat, i.e., there actually were such things as cruise ships.

But my difficulties comprehending The Love Boat were nothing compared to my problems wrapping my poor little head around Fantasy Island. The following is my best attempt to reconstruct my dialogue with my babysitter, who probably should have been getting paid extra that night:

"What's this show about?"

"People come to this island to have their fantasies come true."

"Like, to get their wishes granted?"

"Yeah."

"Is that guy a grown-up?"

"Yes, that's Tattoo. He's a midget."

"So, they wish for like, a million dollars? Or to be president?"

"No, it's like...to reunite with their high school sweetheart."

"Oh. (Pause) Is that guy evil?"

"No. That's Mr. Roarke. He runs the island."*

"And he can make wishes come true?"

"No, the island does that."

"How does the island make wishes come true?"

"It just does. It's magic."

"Oh. (Pause) How come they don't they ask for a million dollars?"

And so on. Probably for the duration of the show. I have absolutely no idea why I thought Mr. Roarke might be evil. I think he probably just seemed a little too smooth. Maybe there was something a bit Satanic about this guy telling young native women to smile, promising to make wishes come true, and detachedly reciting the facts of people's biographies to his creepy diminutive friend. Maybe I had learned to be suspicious of guys in white suits. Who knows?

Later, I found own that not only was Mr. Roarke not evil, he was a man who drove Chryslers and could laugh at himself. When I saw him in interviews, he was extremely charming. And when I saw him in Star Trek II, I realized he was a good actor (especially by comparison to William Shatner) and had amazing pectoral development for a man his age. Now, upon his death, I find out about his charity work and devout Catholicism.

I like to think some angelic Herve Villechaize is now ringing the bell to announce the arrival of Mr. Roarke on the shores of some other pacific paradise. And Saint Peter, attired in white, explains to his assistant that this is Ricardo Montalban, an actor, and that he is to be given a cloud upholstered in "soft Corinthian leather."

On Having One's Eyes Glaze Over

I am now trying to read articles & books on modern aesthetics and critical theory, so as to frame my article properly for scholarly debates, and maybe even learn something. A difficulty arises: these are mind-numbingly boring. Partly this is a reflection that my tiny brain does not function well with these abstractions - I am a historian, and prefer to write "David Hume said this about aesthetics in 1745," not discuss endless lower-case abstractions - judgment, democracy, linguistic-turn, etc. Partly, I will assert, many philosophers are B-O-R-I-N-G. Which includes political theorists, MSI; be careful of this stylistic death trap you are about to enter! Who knew that Habermas was actually a sprightly writer compared with his peers? Now, having said this, I will readily concede that my own writings may lack, you know, intellectual substance. But at least you know what I've said at the end of the day, even if it's trivial.

I know, I know: this critique of academics is so old, so hackneyed, so cliche. But s'welp'me, it's twue! It's twue, it's twue! About the philosophers and political theorists, anyway.

To any editor or peer-reviewer reading this blog, and who recognizes the syntax when you get my actual submitted MS: I don't mean you. It's the other guys.

A Shocking Confession

Okay, I admit it. Occasionally I read Taki Theodoracopulos. That's as far into the paleocon swamps as I'm willing to venture, and I only do it because the guy is such a parody of himself; he never fails to make me chuckle. I suppose it helps that I tend to cut any and all Greeks an unusual amount of slack, and to treat traits of theirs that should be obnoxious as merely entertaining.

For those unfamiliar with Taki's body of work -- and I do want to share my guilty pleasure with the world -- I recommend this latest blog post, which includes almost all the usual Theodoracopulos calling cards: genteel but pronounced anti-semitism, frequent references to Taki's intensely aristocratic lifestyle (particularly in Gstaad), threats of physical violence (Taki is a karate champion), denigration of his enemies' looks and masculinity, mention of "the mother of my children," and a penchant for deploying slightly outdated American slang (Taki was educated in the States). No philandering in this one, alas. (For a little of that, try this post, in which an inebriated Taki is convinced that some random young woman is Naomi Campbell.)

I can't say I think much of Taki's politics, and I'm sure he wouldn't think much of me in general. And the closest I suppose I'll ever get to Taki's lifestyle -- not very close at all, really -- was the time when Arethusa and I managed to score a free upgrade to a suite at Taki's family's old hotel (now owned by others) in the Pankrati section of Athens. I suppose Taki and I do have that in common -- we're both fond of Athens. As for Jerusalem, I've never actually been there...and I'm pretty sure Taki looks down his nose at it.

Bible Dumpers

A couple of months ago, I noted the phenomenon of "antifessors," professors who don't really respect the subject matter they profess to...er, profess.

I don't know how I failed to notice a related phenomenon: the clergyman who doesn't really take seriously the religion that he or she professes. Case in point: Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the Episcopal primate of New Hampshire* who will be delivering an invocation for an Obama inaugural event and who is apparently "horrified" that previous inaugural prayers have been "specifically and aggressively Christian." Bishop Robinson assures the New York Times that he will not be offering a Christian prayer. Goodness no.

Now, I'm not a religious man myself. In fact, I think religion, for all the good effects it's produced over the centuries, is basically nonsense. But I sort of feel that if you're going to be Christian -- if you're going to get paid to be Christian, if you're going to be allowed to tell other Christians how to organize their affairs, for Chrissakes -- then, well, maybe you should go ahead and be Christian. And if you're a Christian, aren't you supposed to be a soldier in the army of the Lord, and all that? Shouldn't you be trying to save souls (including your own) from perdition -- a goal you're more likely to advance with a "specifically and aggressively Christian" invocation than with some namby-pamby appeal to "the god of our various benighted understandings" or whatever?

I would have no problem with hearing Bishop Robinson say he doesn't really believe in what the Episcopal Church teaches. In fact, he and I would then be on the same page. But then he should resign and get some other job in which his position would be more morally and intellectually tenable. I feel the same way about another member of the same communion, the Archibishop of Canterbury, whose views on almost everything seem to run counter to 2,000 years of Christian tradition. Ditto yet another Episcopalian, John Shelby Spong.**

Look, I understand the appeal of the job: power, money, cool clothes, bitchin' gothic architecture, and so forth. But, come on. The job is also supposed to involve a certain degree of moral commitment. Actually, the job is moral commitment. Reading the statements by Bishop Robinson, I couldn't help but think of Homer Simpson's words to Flanders in the "Mr. Plow" episode: "I don't need your phony-baloney job. I'll take your money...but I'm not gonna plow your driveway!"

Insert "preach your gospel" in place of "plow your driveway."

I can only assume that these guys entered the ministry for the same reason the antifessors entered the academy: they disliked religion but feared its power and thus decided to appropriate that power in order to subvert it. Understandable, I suppose. But not very honorable.

[*He happens to be gay (which makes me wonder how he handles the church's requirement that sex not take place outside marriage, not to mention the fairly clear biblical prohibitions on homosexuality) and a recovering alcoholic (which makes me wonder how he handles the communion wine).]

[**I love the fact that the introduction to the Wikipedia article on Spong says "he promotes traditionally liberal causes, such as racial equality." As if that were unusual among clergymen. What's more notable is the whole business of denying the virgin birth and the resurrection.]

Why Is It Called Djibouti?

"Hey mate, didja get Djibouti offa that supertanker?"

"Ain't none of your Afar now, Issa?"

For FLG.

Colonel Redl

I have now seen this movie more times than I ever imagined I would. So: a glorious German-Hungarian movie from ca. 1980, directed by Istvan Szabo, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, based on the life of the bisexual, traitorous, partly-Jewish head of Austria-Hungary's military intelligence section (true story - I swear to God), by way of the John Osborne play of the 1960s, which recast him as a hero of sorts. (Moral: when the only person loyal to the Austro-Hungarian Empire is a bisexual Jew, the Empire is doomed.) I saw it in college for class; saw it again on my own on videotape a few years after - and assigned it this summer for a class. And to show it, bought it cheap on Amazon - where cheap turned out to be a Korean version. Which, after having watched it once in class, watching again with Goldberry, who is good at noticing such things, I discover is a heavily cropped movie, missing twenty minutes out of one hundred forty. (I thought there was something more, I had thought to myself while watching the movie in class, but the thought fluttered out of my head again.) So, I bought at a greater price the actual, full-length version, which I have just now watched, making it three times in one year. It is a good movie - the extra twenty minutes do improve it - but I don't need to see it again for several years. Second moral: don't buy cheap Korean versions of German-Hungarian films.

The aspiring psychoanalyst will notice Withywindlish obsessions in the movie: a partly Jewish hero, the tensions of assimilation, history, and a study of military culture. For those who don't share these interests, it's still a great movie, with lovely waltz music for the score.

On Peer-Reviewed Rejection

It is useful. Take, for example, a pseudonymous blogger who tries submitting articles in a number of different disciplines, each time going way out of his depth. With the most inventive use of key-word searches on JSTOR and library catalogs in the world, I still miss submit articles that 1) don't frame what I'm doing properly; and 2) don't engage sufficiently with the relevant scholarships. Now, one can frame and engage without changing the core of what you're writing -- and, frankly, I intend to do that as much as possible, since I rather think that it is a decent core -- but the framing and the footnotes, and even the modest changes to the substance, do make the difference between something worthy of publication, and something not. So, rah rejection. That said, the rah is reserved for those peer-reviewers who take the time to mention specific problems, authors, and journals, to give me a hook for where to go next. Some do, some are unhelpfully terse and vague in their rejections. I realize peer-review is an unrewarded labor of love, but still, I urge all peer-reviewers reading this blog -- do make the rejection review a paragraph longer, and add details about what's needed to make the article better, even when you think it's woefully insufficient.

Philosophy for Shirebourn

"My eyeglasses, Shirebourn, not yours. Meum, not tuum. The basis of civilization, says John Locke. Shirebourn, no!"

"Shirebourn, be nice to the cat. Oh dear, it's a Hobbesian state of nature. You're nasty, brutish, and short--well, short, very sweet, but with very little sense of consequences--and I'm the Leviathan keeping order. Don't pull his fur, or he'll claw you!"

Batman Begins

Goldberry and I just saw it on DVD, since we'd seen Dark Knight. Man, that was lame. All that nifty realism and terror in the second movie? Not in the first. Makes me think even better of Heath Ledger.

The Usual Alarmism

FLG notes the fact that Charles Blow has written a New York Times column on cocaine use among American high school students. That made me smile.* But the reason I clicked on the link to the column was to see whether Mr. Blow was up to his old tricks -- the misleading use of statistics.

The good news is that Blow doesn't engage in serious quantitative shenanigans this time around. He gets all the numbers right, as far as I can tell. But isn't he cherry-picking like crazy with the apparent intention of (excuse me which I pile on the trite metaphors) making a mountain out of a molehill?

If cocaine use for all teens in the last 30 days has stayed essentially flat at less than 3% since 2001 (as Blow acknowledges)**, does it really matter that white twelfth-graders use cocaine at four times the rate of black twelfth-graders? Does it matter if 1,300 or so more white teens a year -- in the whole United States -- got admitted to drug treatment centers in 2006 than in 2001, when the number at figure bottomed out at around 1,700? Does it even matter that in 2006 white admissions for this drug exceeded black admissions by more than 10 to 1?

Isn't it a little weird to say that "we need a real strategy, right now" just because the small-and-not-increasing number of white kids using cocaine is higher than the small-and-not-increasing number of black kids using cocaine? Do we always have to look for something to worry about?

[*Almost as much as the fact that the head of the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS project, an advocate of male circumcision to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, is named Dr. de Kock.]

[**Even the lifetime rates for twelfth-grade cocaine use, taken from Table 5-1 of this report (large download) top out at around 8%.]

Blago Reads More Poetry

This time it was Tennyson's Ulysses (around 1:45 in the video -- note Shepard Smith's apposite "oh, goody" when Blago announces his intention to quote from the poem).

I'm afraid I don't have a parody this time. (Ulysses, being blank verse, would be hard to parody effectively anyway.) In fact, I'm starting to think there's something slightly pathetic about Rod Blagojevich. What if he really is a sentimentalist who takes personal comfort from these famous verses? I admit, it's a little hard to reconcile with the guy who's on tape spewing the f-word and talking about how he sure as hell intends to cash in on his gubernatorial power to nominate Obama's successor. But we all contain such contradictions.

Maybe, deep down, Milorad Blagojevich was never meant to swim in the dirty waters of Illinois politics. Maybe, when this is all over, he can get a job as an English teacher in some Chicago middle school, sharing his passion for Kipling and Tennyson. "Don't you see how lovely these poems are?" he would ask his bored students. "Fucking golden. They're fucking golden."

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

The comic novel from a decade ago of multi-culti, multi-racial London! - which isn't bad, although it falls apart a bit at the end. I don't think I'll assign it for a Modern Britain class, though -- to its credit, I suppose, its not attempting documentary verisme. It's not attempting to be pollyanna, although I think it is still a touch optimistic -- notably, in its treatment of Muslim immigrants, where the lurch toward fundamentalism is still presented as fundamentally comic and trivial, which several murderous explosions later seems an unwarranted judgment. However, still a good novel, if not a great one.

On J. H. Hexter

I like the idea of calling myself Spengler, but that name's already been taken. I imagine there's a Ranke out there somewhere, and doubtless a Taine and a Parkman. But if I were going to go under the nom de plume of a historian rather than an imaginary river, I think it might be nice to call myself Hexter. Because: he was a specialist in early modern British history, who did solid work in the field; because he was an intellectual historian; because he wrote lucid essays on the practice of history which I find extraordinarily sensible; because he was a puckish wit; because he believed that the history of liberty was the most important and history, and that it ran through England and Parliament. What is there not to like in this combination? - except, of course, the fearful responsibility it would impose on me to be consistently witty and insightful. Safer to remain in riparine pseudonymity.

On Hunger in War

The point of war is to starve your enemies to death. Or to complicate this slightly: the weaker force always retreats into a fortification of some sort to avoid open combat, and can only be defeated by being weakened/killed by starvation. Wherever possible, the weaker force takes hostage a host civilian population, diverting their food supply to the armed men, and forcing the besieging force to starve out the civilians as well -- which, with any luck, adds non-trivial support to the defenders, since the civilians (if of friendly ethnic/religious/what have you background) will blame the besiegers, not the besieged. Most traditional warfare involves starving out fortresses; the Anglo-American way of war has depended on starving enemies to death --whether by destroying food crops among the Irish or the Native Americans, or by the blockade and starvation of the South, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany. And people die: tens of thousands (as I recollect the number) of Netherlanders starved to death in the winter and spring of 1945, with no humanitarian shipments across Nazi lines from the Allies, who knew the food would only be diverted to Nazi soldiers. Not only is this normal, it is, heaven help us, relatively humane. No starvation, no incentive for an enemy to surrender, hence endless war.

The humanitarian urges of modern warfare strike me as gross, ghastly farce -- the idea that we should send food to enemy civilians during warfare is not only a way to prolong a war by feeding enemy soldiers, but immoral - not only by prolonging the war, but by allowing the enemy to kill more of your own. I am reminded of this, of course, by the latest fighting in Gaza, where the Israelis, of course, are feeding Hamas. Insanity. There will be no victory without starving the Palestinians, because (save in extraordinary circumstances) there is never victory without starvation.

Lateline

Now that Al Franken, God help us, is likely to be a Senator, I thought I'd mention his comedy series Lateline from a decade ago, where he plays a super-earnest, super-boring news reporter. There were only 17 episodes ever made, and a high proportion of them are hysterical. (*The Minister of TV*, *Svadharma*, etc.) The ensemble is generally fine, and Ajay Naidu is brilliant as the intern at Lateline. Go take a look; it's fun.

Dark Knight

Just saw the movie, a little late. So: a powerful conception, imperfectly executed. Some clunkiness here and there, the plot gets byzantine largely from an urge to shoehorn both the Joker and Two-Face into one movie, the James Gordon character is too much a visual riff on the comic-book character, and I continue to be dubious about a Batman half-way to becoming Iron Man. But, as everyone says, Heath Ledger as the Joker truly is a stand out. He makes for a realistic comic-book villain, inspiring real fear, real dread. It isn't quite a four-star performance, but it ranges from solid to terrifying. The direction also emphasizes the realism of the entire movie--Batman in something like the real world of 2008, not a stylized Tim Burton fantasy. Christopher Nolan's direction, like Ledger's acting, is imperfect, but generally compelling. No other actor makes quite so strong an impression, although Aaron Eckhart is a rather good Harvey Dent, and struggles on gamely as Two-Face.

On the Conquest and Spoliation of Canada

Can't happen soon enough, if you ask me. Also, as we drive the inhabitants weeping into our cities and latifundia to serve as slaves, it will dry up the demand for illegal immigrant labor.

On Huntington and Western Civ

Samuel Huntington's death reminds me of reading his Clash of Civilizations book, ten-fifteen years back. My dim memory is that it said stuff I already believed in a not terribly convincing manner. I will allow my inner snob to peak out: I'm sure it made an impression on mere pundits, but anyone with a (history) PhD could poke holes in its gross simplifications right and left. The most striking thing about it was a map listing the different civilization areas. The various parts of the West were subdivided into different Christendoms -- and if you looked closely, Israel belonged to none of the civilization areas. I.e., it was its own civilization, and too small either to mention or to print on a global map. Since part of Huntington's thesis was that alliances went naturally within civilization areas, and unnaturally across them, it struck me that the map was itself a sotto voce paleocon argument for abandoning the alliance with Israel. Israel might be part of the West, but the West was meaningless; Israel wasn't part of any Christendom, and that truly mattered.

This makes me think of my bread-and-butter course--Western Civilization. The course, the very title, assumes an argument that Huntington disputes -- that the basic unity is of the West, something larger and more amorphous than Christendom, or any of Christendom's components. And of course it is an argument -- that a secularized West, no longer centrally Christian, but open both to unreligious postChristians and to nonChristians, both exists now and is the natural heir of the civilizational complex of Christendom. It is an argument, by the by, that allows Jews, and latterly Israel, to be an integral part of the West, and not permanent aliens in Christendom. (No original insight here: the defenders of Christendom have been saying this for 200 years.) The very structure of the course by which I pay my rent is itself polemical.

And I am torn about that polemic. I am not entirely convinced there is a West independent of Christendom; I am not entirely convinced that there is anything transcending religious spheres that can bind nations together; I don't particularly want a secular West that supersedes Christianity. But then, I don't want either to abandon Israel or to divorce it from the West; and my own position as a Jew in America becomes infinitely more precarious if I define America as Christendom, and not the West. (Consider this both in terms of an attachment to pure survival, of Jews as Jews, and a simultaneous attachment to the glories of Christendom/Western Civ.) One of my attempted solutions, repeated on this blog, is to consider America as a philosemitic variant of Christendom -- but this has tenuousnesses of its own.

No particular solutions on hand; just being reminded of an ongoing tension.

Solid Interview

It felt like a solid interview. I can't say it was a home-run, but I could believe a solid double. So difficult to tell what the interviewers are actually thinking, but I'd be willing to believe I ended up in the top 50% of candidates. We'll see if that translates into an actual on-campus interview.

David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945-51

An excellent book, as all the reviews say. A dense portrait of life in those years -- not a narrative, not even a clear thesis, but many, many loving details of different aspects of the country -- the schools, housing, the first immigration from the Caribbean, general indifference and cynicism about politics, health care, sports, BBC variety shows on the radio, etc., etc., where the juice and joy is in the etc. Emphasizes how much of Britain was working class -- three quarters, by his account, which is higher than other estimates I've read -- and given how much of his material is from the memoirs of people who rose into the middle class, also foreshadows the enormous class mobility of the 1950s and 1960s. (A lot of memoirs of people in show biz, by the by -- actors, writers, musicians, what have you. I don't think that biases the portrait, but it's also interesting for telling us who gets written up, or writes about their past; and perhaps indicates there was more social mobility in show biz than in other parts of the British elite during the following generation.) A fascinating statistic indicating who austerity bit: that compared with 1937, middle class real income was down 25% a decade later, but working class income was up 10%. Some exploration of how rationing let everyone eat sufficiently, but never as much as they wanted -- all those candy bars and burgers you couldn't eat, which was probably healthier, but left you with a constant gnawing craving. Oh, and middle-class calorie consumption was also down from 1937. And just for paranoia: one of his sources is this Mass Observation organization, who went around not just interviewing people about what they thought, but eavesdropping in taverns, queues, parades, etc.! Great material, but a little creepy. (I suppose every consumer research organization does it now as a matter of course, and it will be even creepier when that gets published.) Sadly, I will never be able to assign this in a class -- too long at 600 pages. Bu well worth the read.